A Historian’s Fascination with War

Over the course of his career, Professor Ian Morris has found that war plays an integral part in the human story. According to Morris, “If you do not try to understand the history of war, you are really never going to understand history.” By using multiple disciplines, Morris believes that understanding war ultimately is an issue in biology. Only a few species of animals have evolved to cooperate rather than use violence, suggesting that war and violence are deeply embedded in our biology.

 

This is where evolution enters the human story. The death rates ten thousand years ago compared to the present are starkly different: “If you are a male chimpanzee, you will have a ten to twenty-five percent chance of death by violence. Hunter-gatherer societies have rates of death similar to chimpanzees,” Morris explains. “But in the twentieth century, where the most wars and genocides have occurred, your chance of dying violently is one in a hundred.” How were humans able to achieve this extraordinary reduction in violence?

 

Perspectives on Wars: Past and Present

Out of the wars in history, Morris finds the Second World War the most extraordinary because of the different way in which it was fought. “Wars have changed dramatically in the way they are fought,” he explains. In the past, wars were very messy, to the point where differentiating whose side people were on was difficult. But in the past ten thousand years, according to Morris, we have been moving towards a reduction of war between more clearly defined nation-states. What contributed to this decrease in violence?

 

A big contributing factor, Morris believes, was the introduction of nuclear weapons. “All of a sudden, the presence of nuclear weapons means that the downside risk of trying to use nuclear weapons to settle your problems is going up to infinity,” Morris says. “There’s a real possibility of destroying all life on the planet.” In response to this growing cost of using violence, humans have responded rationally by seeking less violent approaches to solutions between states.

 

Ian Morris’s Guide to Understanding the History of War

To understand the history of war, according to Morris, it is necessary to understand two parts of war. First, we must realize that the ability to use violence is part of our biology and thus colors everything in human life. Second, we have to understand that humans are the only animals that, through social means, have reduced the amount of violence in society.

 

But Morris’s belief in this fundamental relationship between war and biology has stirred up arguments. For instance, some people may argue that if it’s violence is part of human nature, shouldn’t it be okay to be violent? But Morris rejects this line of thinking. “Those arguments are silly,” Morris says. “If the fact that we die is part of our biology, then that doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay that I’m going to die, I don’t think it’s okay at all.”

 

We are lucky to be part of this race at this moment in history. Despite the emergence of technologies, such as automated rifles, that make it easier to kill large numbers of people, the rates of violence in modern society are comparatively paltry. “For someone from the stone age,” Morris explains, “the U.S. would look like a magical kingdom, the fact that you can have large groups of people coexist peacefully.”